I suspect that out of the 2% of people who answered the phone (and the smaller percentage that stayed on for the whole poll), there were some number of young people whose parents answered the phone and then answered all the poll questions for them, or something weird like that.
Maybe not. But in general, the whole methodology starts to look like a big pile of garbage the closer you look at it. It's not surprising for some answers to come out of it that are very obviously wrong.
IT'S THE CANDIDATE'S JOB TO WIN VOTES!!
It's the news media's job to report the reality of what's going on, not just filter people's explicit-propaganda-created misunderstandings of what's going on through the most slanted methodology they can possibly find and then report it back to us like a money fueled human-centipede loop, but what can you do. We all have bad days doing our jobs sometimes.
I didn't ask about how you felt about Israel's genocide. I'm assuming, based on what you already said, that you're against it. So am I.
If you had to narrow down your feelings on the Uyghur internment camps to one of three responses, would it be:
And, the same question for the police response in Hong Kong.
we give more weight to respondents from demographic groups underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree
Oooooohhh
All of sudden it makes sense
Here's their methodology page, with in addition to that fuckin fascinating tidbit you quoted, some other things of note:
It is, indeed, always possible.
New York Times doing its thing again
Presenting the poll results for registered voters, with candidates limited to Biden or Trump with no RFK involved, both of which are decisions which will swing things towards Trump and away from reality, is a decision that I'm hard pressed to explain any other way than that they're looking for the worst numbers they can present.
It's not even like the answers to the more accurate question were even any better for Biden. To me they look more or less the same (i.e. serious trouble for Biden). My only explanation is that a lot of these likely voters don't know their ass from their elbow (e.g.
Oooooh
This is interesting.
Look at the question "What one issue is most important in deciding your vote this November?"
It leads off with:
... and then, way down below, is "The state of democracy/corruption" (with 6% still bucking the trend to vote for it), and "The Middle East/Israel/Palestinians" (2%).
Lo and behold, a whole lot of people voted for one of the first two options, and also tended to answer questions about how they felt about the economy overall, and whether they felt overall happy with how things were going, accordingly.
I would be interested to see how this poll was presented exactly (especially whether written or verbal, and what order for the questions), and what the numbers would be if there was a similar weight of questioning and emphasis given to "The state of democracy/corruption" as a major issue. Maybe the results would be the same. Maybe not. I'd be interested to see it.
(Edit: Someone else sussed it out better than I did; their methodology was actually much worse and more explicitly slanted than that.)
Yeah. You could say he’s being sarcastic when he praises Lecter, and his actual point is that some of the people that countries are “sending” the to US, as part of their government immigrant-sending programs apparently, are cannibals. But that is also an insane thing to say so it’s really hard to tell.
I think his brain is just falling apart and he didn’t care much in the first place whether what he says had any connection to reality, and so this is the kind of thing that falls out.
He didn't liken migrants to Hannibal Lecter. It's a little hard to tell exactly what he meant, but what he said was that he was a wonderful man, and then he called him the late great Hannibal Lecter, and then he told him congratulations. Saying foreign countries are sending Hannibal Lecters into our country is one interpretation but honestly who knows.
Here's the video; the relevant part of the transcript in context is:
Venezuela just announced and it had a new number was 67 now it's 72% 72% they're down in crime because they took their gangs their gang members they took a lot of their criminals and they moved them into the United States of America jail populations all over the world are way down and these fools back there the press the fake news they don't want to report it you know why they're down because they're sending people in their jails into the United States from Africa from Asia from all over the world they're emptying out their jails into the United States they're emptying out their mental institutions into the United States our beautiful country and now the prison populations all over the world are down they don't want to report that the mental institution population is down because they're taking people from insane asylums and from mental institution you know what the difference is Right an insane asylum is a mental institution on steroids Silence of the Lambs has anyone ever seen Silence of the Lambs the late great Hannibal Lector he's a wonderful man he often times would have a friend for dinner remember the last scene excuse me I'm about to have a friend for dinner as this poor doctor walked by I'm about to have a friend for dinner but Hannibal Lector congratulations the late great Hannibal Lector we have people that are being released into our country that we don't want in our country and they're coming in totally unchecked totally unvetted and we can't let this happen they're destroying our country and we're sitting back and we better damn well win this election cuz if we don't our country is going to be doomed it's going to be doomed so I took hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs and taxes and fees from China and other countries also not just China everyone rips us all of them the European Union is brutal they all are brutal because they were dealing with people that didn't care they had no business bent they were politicians that didn't want to rock the boat European Union treats us very badly they learned they learned we did a lot of things with them uh Macron of France good guy's a friend of mine but he loves France and he was going to put a tax on All American Business a very substantial tax 25% on American businesses in France and my people went I gave it to Steve Mnuchin
"The mine owners did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy, all the gold belonged to them." -Bill Haywood
"If one man has a dollar he didn’t work for, some other man worked for a dollar he didn’t get." -also Big Bill
It's late and I'm tired, I can search some examples from the HUAC or w/e of pre-1941 opposition of nazi germany gets smeared as pro-communism another time.
I'll be waiting eagerly for you to enlighten me
Random question, what's your opinion on the Uyghur re-education camps? Or the treatment of the Hong Kong protestors and how it compares with the treatment of US protestors of aid to Israel?
Other people in other threads have found more of the fucky things about this poll; it was a phone poll which 2% of people answered the phone for, which made no attempt to correct for "what ideological mentalities are likely to answer the phone to random numbers", and then on top of that explicitly made adjustments like increasing the weight of non-college-educated people for some pretty dubious reason.
Polls sound great. The fact that the election is even within 10 points, or 20, should lead to alarm in the Biden camp, and cause some deep soul searching for what went so wrong in the American system that we could be talking about electing Lex Luthor mayor and people are taking it seriously as an idea and it's even a question of who is going to win the election. I think education and media are the main culprits. Concrete things Biden is doing are not unrelated, exactly (especially on aid for Israel), but they honestly don't seem to make all that much difference, and a lot of people who are voicing concerns about him seem totally unaware of concrete things he's been doing.
I'm by no means saying don't be alarmed. I think we should be very alarmed. But yes, also, I think we should call out bullshit polls when they are as clearly bullshit as this one is (as part of examining the reasons why a respectable news outlet would even be reporting a close poll between Biden and Trump as anything other than the absolute looming catastrophe that it objectively is.)
That's actually a really good point -- I'll try to come up with some concrete things I can do to help Biden win sometimes later today. I just went to verify that I'm registered to vote (I still am), and I think maybe a good thing politically overall would be a little informational thing about who to vote for in Congress. Presumably some little tool already exists that can tell if your congresspeople have been voting for aid for Israel, inform your voting accordingly instead of just blindly checking the D box, things like that, but I don't know all that much about it.
IDK, I'll see what I can come up with later on today if I have some time. It's a good reminder that talking on the internet without some sort of action isn't always a good investment of time.